I really can't explain climate science, but all the major science organizations in the world believe that AGW is a scientific fact, not a hoax.

The Tomsk scientist Dr. Kirpotin is very angry about the scandal called "Climategate." He views Climategate as a "provocation" to damage the credibility of the Climatic Research unit (CRU) scientists and their research right before the December 2009 Copenhagen meeting on climate change. (See my previous post).According to the Independent (12-7-09):The leaked emails, which claimed to provide evidence that the unit's head, Professor Phil Jones, colluded with colleagues to manipulate data and hide "unhelpful" research from critics of climate change science, were originally posted on a server in the Siberian city of Tomsk, at a firm called Tomcity, an internet security business.

Dr. Kirpotin says that it is clear that an "order" was given to steal selected e-mails from the CRU server, post them on the Tomsk server used by TSU, and spread the e-mails on the Internet in order to increase skepticism about global warming. Except for Russian Greenpeace, no Russian media carried Sergei Kirpotin's views.Something is wrong when the views of a prominent scientist with an international reputation like Dr. Kirpotin do not receive a fair hearing in his own country during this debate.

Western scientists suspect that the Russian state security--the FSB--is behind the kompromat of the CRU scientists. The FSB denies responsibility for the hacking and claims they have proof that the Chinese are the culprits.

Sometimes Western scientists have defended Soviet scientists who were defamed and maligned by the Soviet-era KGB, but here it seems that a Russian scientist who lives in Russia is defending Western scientists who may have been defamed and maligned by the Russian successor-agency of the KGB, the FSB. I think Dr. Kirpotin has a lot of courage.

Many Western bloggers who are skeptics of AGW have jumped on the anti-CRU bandwagon and are insulting the integrity of the CRU scientists without really understanding what the "defamatory" e-mails are actually discussing. The blogger-skeptics say that it doesn't matter who posted the e-mails because the evidence speaks for for itself. In fact, scientists are trying to explain what these out-of-context e-mails mean (See here, here, here, and here).

The blogger-skeptics typically claim that a disillusioned CRU insider "leaked" the e-mails. If so, why would the Russian FSB claim that they have proof that the culprits are Chinese hackers?